Wind energy forecasting is significantly affected by the strong volatility, intermittency and variability of the wind speed sequence itself. Therefore, to improve forecast accuracy and stability, based on nonlinear auto-regressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX) and the hybrid chaos-cloud salp swarm algorithm (CC-SSA), a short-term wind speed prediction method is proposed. Firstly, to reduce the complexity of the original wind speed data and generate subcomponents with different patterns and low complexity, a mixed modal decomposition method is carried out by combining variational modal decomposition (VMD) based on Pearson correlation coefficient and generalized S-transform (GST) based on adaptive sample entropy. Therefore, the complementary advantages of different mode decompositions are obtained by combining the two different subcomponents into a mixed component. Secondly, by using cloud model and chaotic map, the improved CC-SSA algorithm is proposed to improve the convergence performance of salp swarm algorithm (SSA). Finally, by using CC-SSA algorithm to optimize the weights of NARX, the CC-SSA-NARX forecasting model is established to predict wind speed. The experimental results show that for the 1-Step, 2-Step, and 3-Step datasets of the actual wind speed in the studied region, the MAE, MAPE, RMSE, and R2 of the CC-SSA-NARX model are 0.23, 6 %, 0.27, and 0.97 respectively. The proposed model present the highest prediction index among the other 7 comparative models, showing high accuracy and generalization ability in short-term wind speed prediction, it can provide a certain reference for enhancing the stability of wind power generation and promoting the sustainable development of the wind power industry to some extent.